If you’ve ever wondered what is meant by the term Americana, look no further: Rhiannon Giddens is a one-woman definition of a genre that sometimes feels like a catch-all for guitar-based music that isn’t pop or rock. So while she ranges across different styles of old-time music – bit of cajun here, a jig there – she roots it all in the rich story-telling traditions of the American South, taking us from the miseries of slavery, through the civil war and onwards to the freedom marches of the 1960s.
Strapping on a banjo, she kicks off with an jaunty version of an old Bob Dylan song, Spanish Mary, a tale of love on the high seas. There are a few more covers to come, but her latest solo album (her recording career started with the Carolina Chocolate Drops) is mostly her own work, none better than At The Purchaser’s Option, a harrowing story of a black woman who faces being forced to part with her baby on the whim of a plantation owner. Much of her new material consciously mines the past for inspiration, she says, and slavery is also the theme of another sublime new song, We Could Fly, which draws on the legends used by African-Americans to metaphorically escape their chains.
It’s mesmerising stuff and, in an impressive display of virtuosity, she picks up a fiddle and gives us a few jigs to remind us that she’s fluent in many musical languages (she trained as an opera singer and has played in Celtic string bands).
But it is her voice that is the truly outstanding instrument of the night. She uses it to great effect on Waterboy, the track she performed to acclaim on Another Day/Another Time, the live album spun out from the Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis. On the old Patsy Cline song, She Got You, she wrings every last ounce of emotion out of the bittersweet lament – “I’ve got your picture, she’s got you”. This is pure soul – old-fashioned, belt-it-out type soul – that I’ve only ever heard on Atlantic records. It makes me feel like I’m listening to Aretha Franklin.
Her vocals might have been even better but for a bout of tonsilitis that has put her on some “serious steroids”, forcing her to finish the show without the usual encores. It’s a shame, but doesn’t detract from a magnificent set.
Rhiannon Giddens is playing at the Southbank in Melbourne on Monday 10 April, the Corner Hotel in Richmond, Victoria on 11 April, and then the Bluesfest, Byron Bay on 13 April.
